


Bohemian Rhapsody

by gardnerhill



Series: A Study In Crimson [11]
Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Alternate Universe - Pirate, Female Character of Color, Gen, International Talk Like A Pirate Day, Pirates, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-19
Updated: 2014-09-19
Packaged: 2018-02-18 02:18:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,465
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2331575
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gardnerhill/pseuds/gardnerhill
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>We meet someone only talked about before.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bohemian Rhapsody

**Author's Note:**

> Because it would be wrong of me to let “Talk Like a Pirate Day” pass without a new “Study in Crimson” tale.

“A prize!” called the crow’s nest.

The captain swung up to the prow, snapping open the glass to focus on the dark shape floating ahead of them, the crumpled mess that had been the mainmast. And smiled.

The mate cursed at the wheel. “A carcase. Some fucking pirate’s had it first, there’ll be nothing left.”

“Plenty of meat on those bones.” The captain shut the spyglass. “Red party, hooks and cutlasses. Mr. Trini, into them.”

“Captain?” the mate asked.

“Look again, Chiu. Tell all damage.”

The wiry rigger scrambled halfway up the foresail, his own glass out. “Mainmast snapped, Cap’n. No burns in sails, no holes in the hull.”

“No other damage.” The captain drew a saber that glittered in the sun. “A mast snapped with one six-pounder shot, with the precision of a marksman.”

Slowly, grins bloomed all around from the sea-wolves that crewed this ship.

“The _Baker_ ’s leavings.” Ox-eye cocked his pistol.

“That's two for one, Cap'n,” Veit added, slithering down the mainmast from the crow, also toothily grinning.

Trini spun the wheel, teeth bared. The sails billowed.

In the short time the _King of Bohemia_ swept down upon the drifting ship and the disarmed men making repairs, the red party lined the hull on striking side. Not a roar from the cannon, not a shot fired. Hooks only, and swords, as a band of men leaped across and onto the screaming Spanish sailors aboard the lamed vessel.

The Adder led the attack, her blood-red waist-length matted locks of hair swinging like Medusa’s snakes, teeth bared in a great grin at the looks of horror on the men’s faces. Men used to stare only at her breasts, and when she’d taken up the cutlass herself they looked at her with scorn for her sex, for her black skin, for her wide girth; they’d sneered at the cap’n’s doxy, the fat Negro wench, the red-head. Now they knew her as The Woman, the Adder, and they saw their own deaths in her face.

Spaniards – She cursed, sweeping open one man’s belly with the cutlass downstroke. “Your captain! Your captain!" she shouted at them in their own language

One man grabbed a fistful of her dreadlocks. She whipped her head around and yanked hard, and the man screamed, letting go, his hand a sliced mass of blood and ruined fingers. She swept her blade down and the man stopped screaming; she strode over his corpse, his blood now part of her coif along with the razor shards embedded in her thick locks.

Minutes after they’d boarded the screaming stopped. Only the captain lived, shaking, held down on his knees between Gil and Chiu in the welter of blood from his own men.

“Gold, Cap’n!” Blue-Leg Peter called up exultantly from the hold. “Ten chests of gold!”

The Bohemias cheered.

The Woman smiled. This day just got better. That clinched the proof that this was the Baker’s kill – only Shear-Lock was fool enough to keep to the niceties of his Letter of Marque in the face of such temptation. And gold! Teak and cotton and wine were valuable but nothing glittered like gold.

“The _Baker_ ,” she said to the wide-eyed captain. "Shear-Lock. Captain Shear-Lock?"

That seemed to set off a bout of hysteria from the man. She listened as he ranted about Shear-Lock and a fellow named "Gold-Hand" taking his gold and two of his sailors, and even his cabin-boy. 

The Adder furrowed her brow. It was said Shear-Lock press-ganged the strangest men at the oddest times – Hopkins had literally jumped from the _Scotland_ to the _Baker_ in Nassau Port (to the cursing of Captain l’Estrade at losing his second mate).

But that name…

"Gold-Hand?"

More babbling. A man with a gold hand, a hand with a big serrated knife on the end, a pirate-killer. Possibly had gotten the name because he wore a lot of bracelets and rings.

"He killed your men?"

“No, no, in Tortuga!”

Killed pirates in Tortuga - a man with a reputation. Shear-Lock was pressing killers now. She fingered her pistol.

Only three guns aboard, despite the dead soldiers all over the deck; Shear-Lock had taken the muskets too.

The Adder walked away from the captive and climbed up on the bowsprit. A mammoth bare-breasted white woman was carved and painted on the hull as figurehead, with _Gloriana_ in gold script on either side. In true sailor fashion, the wooden woman’s breasts were enormous grotesqueries with jutting pink nipples. She was probably supposed to look like a barbarian goddess, but to men all women were whores. The captain nodded.

Flea stood at the door of the captain’s cabin, his arms full of papers. The captain’s logbook, the account books for the goods. An inkpot and quill balanced atop the lot.

Ah, now for their second meal – two for one, as Veit had said. She nodded, and the quartermaster painted the covers of both ledgers in ink, marking a large black spider on each. Adder nodded; Flea’s work was the spitting image of the emblem painted on the wolf-keeper’s ship. “Bilge, both of them.”

As Flea scuttled below to leave the books in the mess of sludgy water and filth that slopped in the bottom of every ship that ever sailed, The Woman looked at the Gloriana’s captain. He met her glare.

She’d defeated his ship, killed all his men, taken the rest of his gold, and she’d done it all while being a black woman. Now would come the inevitable –

His snarling spate of speech was a familiar coda to her raids. Spanish. French, English of course, Portuguese, German, Dutch, Cameroonian, Jamaican cant – she’d heard men call her “Fucking black devil bitch whore” in every language that sailed these waters.

She smiled, and his angry words stopped. She always used the honeyed voice she’d cultivated from her days in Captain Von Kramm’s bed. “So you prefer white ladies. Very well, a white lady you shall have." She nodded to Chiu and Veit, and they grinned; wise to their captain’s ways, they stepped out of her way just as she turned her back on the captive – with a coquettish toss of her head.

Her mass of red dreadlocks slapped the Spanish captain across his face. His bubbling shriek of pain followed her down into the hold to supervise the cargo lading.

An hour later the gold was stowed in the hold of the _King of Bohemia_. All the Bohemias were back aboard. The Adder came back aboard last, and was the first to throw a sulphur bomb at the deck of their corpse-strewn prize. Others pitched in, whooping. A dozen more fireballs, and the _Gloriana_ – sails and seasoned wood and tarred rope – was ablaze stern to prow.

And the captain - his face sliced to ribbons, his naked body bound between the white pink-tipped breasts of his ship’s figurehead - screamed as flames engulfed them both.

***

She finished the letter to her employer, with the pages torn from the Gloriana’s books as proof. Port Royal wanted her hanging by her dreadlocks, but Moriarty had his ways of receiving information.

 _Stay away from him_ , the wolf-keeper said _. Do not engage him, and_ do not kill him _or I will have you quartered. Follow him, and finish his kills as creatively as possible_. _Make him a pirate in deed._

She was to be a deerhound - drive the prey out of hiding and into her keeper’s arms.

A clever man, Moriarty. The privateer Shear-Lock didn’t drink, plundered one-handed where anyone else used both hands, didn’t keep a whore (though there _was_ that cabin boy he took…), and took most of his ships without killing a soul; he was Goddamn-near respectable. But a few more of these strikes, and word would spread of Shear-Lock’s new-found bloodthirstiness now that he was freed from the Crown’s regard. Up would go the reward offered, and every Carib with a floating boat would hare after the _Baker_.

And all The Woman had to do was what she did best, and take whatever treasure Shear-Lock left behind as well. Enough ships, and she would demand he give her a Letter of Marque.

Court intrigue was no different at sea. The fight was on between Shear-Lock and her wolf-keeper.

And as the captain of the _King of Bohemia_ prepared correspondence – this former doxy of the ship’s first captain and now terror of the South Seas, happily giving back to her victims all the mercy that white men with the power in these waters ever showed a black woman – she pondered a gold hand holding a serrated knife, a pirate-killer on the _Baker_. Such a man wouldn’t be happy on Shear-Lock’s tame little vessel. She would find him, and offer him the choice to sail under her flag or under her hair.

The Woman smiled.

**Author's Note:**

> This story has been edited to remove several offensive passages. My deepest apologies for offending native speakers of other languages through my ignorance in misusing their speech. This offense will not be repeated.


End file.
